Nora, Melbourne Review

Few places could make the change from daytime café to
dinner-only dégustation restaurant seem like business as usual.
Then again, not too many places would start a meal with a container
covered in synthetic turf bearing crunchy deep-fried coriander
roots dusted with "tasty powder" and a deep-fried sardine skeleton
laying on edible dirt (dehydrated mushroom, scallop and longan)
inside. And then call them What Goes Up Must Come Down and Beneath
the Ground. And then manage to turn a potentially disastrous
collision of multiple ideas into something delicious.

Not many places. But Nora does, emphatically. Understanding just
how surprising this is calls for a bit of backstory.

Its owners, Jean Thamthanakorn and Sarin Rojanametin and, are
restaurant novices who fled the worlds of advertising and finance
to open Nora in Carlton in 2014. Before they opened, Rojanametin
spent time working in cafés such as Brother Baba Budan and Seven
Seeds, and Thamthanakorn taught herself to bake. The black charcoal
pastry tarts she began supplying to various cafés attracted a cult
following.

That scant experience aside, all the couple appeared to bring
was a singular vision and an uncompromising determination to
present that vision intact in one of Melbourne's most traditional
food suburbs.

Not everyone appreciated the no-espresso, no-avocado,
no-bacon-and-eggs approach at Nora. And when breakfast expectations
are thwarted by a menu of smarty-pants dishes such as Churning of
the Sea of Milk (smoked jasmine-cured fish, coconut ricotta,
flying-fish roe and succulents) some might interpret uncompromising
as arrogant. There were walkouts.

There was also a groundswell of fans drawn to food cooked by a
self-taught chef who combined the ingredients he loved when he was
growing up in Thailand with a fascination with modern cooking
technique. But the format remained problematic.
Rojanametin might have been creating unique flavour combinations
but did people want to keep eating them for breakfast?

The answer came when the set-course Small Dinner Club that Nora
started running on Friday nights kept selling out. Thamthanakorn
and Rojanametin shut the place down, renovated the tiny open
kitchen, bought some new furniture, added booze to the repertoire
and reopened as a dinner joint.

"Sorry I'm Crabby Today"

It's still uncompromising. The three sittings a night pretty
much discourage all but the most well timed of walk-ins. The menu
can be tweaked but Nora's ability to cater to the swell of dietary
requirements is limited. Even common or garden vegetarians have to
be patient, with a meat-free menu still in the works.

And speaking of menus, there isn't one. A list of what you ate
and drank is given to you afterwards but as you eat you just get
the name of the dish as it lands.

This is not particularly illuminating when the names include the
likes of The Study of Perspective, Too Many Italians and Only One
Asian or Daft Punk is Playing in My Mouth.
Still, the experience is playful not punishing, helped in no small
part by calm and beautifully hospitable service. And it gets you
eating things that, had they been written down, you might have
decided to skip.

Take Tagliatelle of Oyster Not Oyster. The hint's there: this
oyster-looking dish may not actually contain any oysters. It
arrives on a platter of real oyster shells but the edible part,
another oyster shell sitting on the top, is actually pastry made
with two different-coloured doughs, giving it the marbled effect of
the real thing. It's one bite, but what a bite: crunchy, soft
textures; sweet, salty, tangy, fishy flavours. And surely the
central ingredient is an oyster? But no. It's a chicken heart,
marinated in a mix of coriander seed, black and white pepper,
oyster, fish and soy sauces and coconut milk. It's cooked sous-vide
to give it oyster-like texture and is then served in the "shell"
topped with a sweet fish sauce, fermented fish paste, coconut
cream, frozen pomelo and a "tagliatelle" made from pickled
shallots. Its effect is like that of a miang, Thai street food's
betel-leaf snack, with flavour explosions that come from every
angle but end up making complete sense.

There's similar instances of joyful sleight of hand throughout
the two hours it takes to work through the menu.

Too Many Italians and Only One Asian, Rojanametin's ode to
operating in the middle of an Italian culinary heartland, looks
like pasta tossed with a pesto-like sauce. But the pasta is green
papaya cut and blanched to look something like linguine. The pesto
is bright and punchy, a mix of roasted cashew nuts, sator (aka
stink beans) and pieces of school prawn, combined with a sorrel oil
and sprinkled with fermented garlic powder.

"Too Many Italians and Only One Asian"

Sorry I'm Crabby Today is another dish that hints at the
existence of something in both title and appearance but the "crab"
is shreds of custard apple sitting in a cool broth made from
roasted mackerel bones. In it float holy basil seeds, finger lime,
star gooseberry and it's topped with a delicate slick of seaweed
oil. It's so clever, interesting and downright flavoursome that you
forget to feel cheated that no actual crab died in the making of
this dish.

Daft Punk is Playing in My Mouth stretches it in terms of how
dish and name relate but is a highlight. It's a good-looking mix of
slivers of pickled blue mackerel sitting on a piece of compressed
watermelon and topped with a sparkling green chilli and lime
granita and smoked salt. To the side there's a circle of ink-dark
black sesame sauce, its earthiness adding a clever extra layer to
all the salty, vinegar, chilli notes.

There are layers with the drink matching, too.

On one hand there's the very reasonably priced and interesting
alcohol pairing from fresh-faced sommelier Kentaro Emoto. On the
other is the surprisingly excellent juice option, put together by
Thamthanakorn. Emoto is deeply committed to his job but is never
boring. He communicates his excitement with ease, pulling out
pairings from a list of New and Old World minimal-interventionist
wine, unfiltered sake, whisky and artisan beer.

Glenglassaugh Torfa, a Highland single malt, is a particularly
great match with Childhood Bread, a course that lands in the middle
of the menu and consists of a superb small roll made from sourdough
starter and toasted red rice. It's served in a lidded terracotta
pot, sitting on a bed of smoking red rice, the smoke wafting about
when the lid's lifted. There's fermented shrimp butter in the mix
too and so the smoky, peaty Scotch becomes a perfectly logical
fit.

Thamthanakorn's juice combinations are all intriguing but
they're particularly noteworthy for the absence of overt sweetness.
The match with Grandma's Cabbage, an outstanding blend of pork
mince spiced with white pepper and brushed with a roast pork hock
glaze then tucked into lightly fermented cabbage leaves, is a
refreshing, even thrilling blend of Granny Smith apple, shiitake
mushrooms and coriander.

Somellier Kentaro Emoto works the floor.

Then there's the subtle, thirst-quenching coconut and chive
combination that's served with Thai Cupcake Wanting to be Western,
a dessert that looks like (and sort of is) a baked potato wrapped
in foil.

It's actually a salt-baked King Edward potato skin, hollowed
out, frozen and then deep-fried. It's served skin-side up,
semi-wrapped in foil, so it looks like a jacket potato but flip it
over and there's a coconut cream and sugar-flavoured potato soufflé
to tuck into. It's not really sweet but the texture and flavour
emphatically drag it into dessert territory.

Nora's dining room is its least thrilling aspect. It's stylishly
done on a tight budget and the wider-berthed among us will be
relieved that the toy-like stools from Nora's café days have been
banished, replaced by comfortable armchairs. There are now five
seats at the tiny open kitchen-bar for those after a chef's table
experience, and a round table that seats eight at the front of the
timber-floored space. But the lighting is too bright at certain
tables and the room feels a little utilitarian, despite the appeal
of the illuminated Nora sign, some charming wine shelves, coloured
napkins and the lists of ingredients painted onto the walls near
the toilets.

But a utilitarian room could be part of the plan.

The focus here is on the food, with the juice, wine, service,
handmade plates and low-key décor playing fiercely loyal support
cast. And that's how it should be because what Sarin Rojanametin is
creating in his pint-sized workspace is original, surprising and
delightful. Artful, even. The Thai aspects - the ingredients and
techniques, the names that emulate the traditional way Thai dishes
are named - make Nora particular in terms of dégustation in
Melbourne.

But combine that with Rojanametin's obvious influences (New
Nordic, Blumenthal, Bottura, Marco) and his non-trained,
non-linear, creative approach to cooking and you get something else
again. And that's unique.